By Arthur Davis

Storylandia 17 features eight tales of dark fantasy, horror and the surreal by American writer Arthur Davis. “The Man From Lahr” is a tale of magical realism as a New York psychiatrist is visited after-hours in his office by a mysterious stranger who has traveled from Eastern Europe with an unlikely tale, and an even more improbable truth. “Dining With The Devil” holds us transfixed as the incarnation of evil reveals the ancient promise on which he has come to collect, and the extraordinary dish on which he has travel so far to feast. A foggy, chilly night on a dangerous road is the setting for “Cara’s Curve,” a narrative of regrets, doubts, confessions and the discovery of a dead man whose reach quickly claims an innocent soul. “A Sly And Knowing Grin,” interweaves the macabre with science fiction as strangers in a bookstore are presented with a horror that tests their fears and overwhelms their ability to cope. In a time-honored misadventure of the mind, “The Unwelcome Guest,” spins a fishing tale of horror that blurs the boundaries between reason and magical realism in a cross between Rieux’s rat-obsessed isolation in Camus’s “The Plague” and Samsa’s transformation in Kafka’s “Metamorphosis.” Shrouded in sheets of black gossamer, “Dionaea Muscipula’s” dead bodies lie in the street of a deserted town in Maine in this surreal puzzle warning that death “be not the noble path of wise and aged men.” “I Have Become The Leopard” takes the reader on a haunting journey through the mind, heart and soul of a leopard, exposing instincts and consciousness that drives Africa’s most solitary big cat. In a direct-address monologue, “The Cracked Goblet’s” narrator leads his friend through the English countryside in search of an abandoned mansion in this intellectual thriller with the troubling neurosis of Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness” and the unfathomable paranoia of “The Twilight Zone.”

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“Poetry and Red Phosphorus” by Kellie R. England, “Assassin” by Adam Bourke, “Escaping the Apoidians Hivault” by Christopher Husmann, “Kiva” by Cinsearae S., and “Have You Ever Seen The Rain?” by Mylochka. Cover: “Leaf” by Tom Good

Excerpts:

Poetry and Red PhosphorusBy Kellie R. England

It is perhaps the nature of the scientific mind to train itself to reject poetic and passionate thoughts as inconsequential frivolity while aspiring to think on things of logic and reason, teaching itself to dismiss the vulgar and commonplace in favor of chemistry and mathematics. However, as the mind grows rigid with certainties, the slightest disturbance can upset the fragile order, so that it becomes a great and terrible shock when a new variable enters into one’s life so as to inject one with strange and frightening ideas. Exactly such an event occurred to Professor Robert Pearson, a middle-aged, self-proclaimed man of science, in a way to wholly unbalance his very existence.

AssassinBy Adam Bourke

Time Passes. Winds blow and waves break. Change Happens. There is always change. The lands of Pyrrhus are constantly changing. The twelve gods keep the world in balance, but even they cannot stop the change. Mighty empires rise and fall in epic wars, Continents are drowned and raised in terrible conflicts between good and evil. And there are smaller changes. Somewhere a midwife delivers a child to proud parents, or else an old man passes away quietly. The magnitude various, but there is only one thing always constant. There is always change.

Escaping the Apoidians HivaultBy Christopher Husmann

“Do you think you can just take this? THIS?! You really think you can just walk in here, and simply pluck something up for your own benefit? Something that is clearly not yours in any way, shape or form?” An instectoid croaked with rage, as its stout, translucent wings vibrated furiously giving the human-sized creature, lift. The agitated bug twitched here and there, floating in circles around its target, which stood there in the middle of a dim-lit dome-shaped room.

KivaBy Cinsearae S.

Her mind drifts back to a time when the women in her family were still alive. Although she did not always get along with them, she misses their faces, their voices, their smiles. She took for granted their short existence on earth, often regretting not having listened more closely to the stories of their own lives, repetitive and lackluster as they were. The males of her family were also long gone; if there were any alive she did not know.

Have You Ever Seen The Rain?By Mylochka

“If I not charged wit’ nothin’,” the boy argued. “You got to be lettin’ me go….Else I done got to charge you wit’ kidnapping. You a kidnapper, man?”

Marcus Brown gave a tight smile to the young man on the other side of his desk. He’d only recently moved to New Orleans from the Midwest. He’d been warned that working here would be different than anything he’d experienced. Having been a caseworker in Kansas City, he thought he’d already seen it all. He had been wrong. “Would you like some coffee?”

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